It is Academy Awards season, and many of my friends here in Los Angeles have a small list of movies they want to watch before the Oscar ceremony on February 22. I am no exception, and one of the films I saw this weekend was The Wrestler. I did not expect much, but critically acclaimed movies in any country in America often tell us important truths about ourselves, sometimes unintentionally. And the unusually intense buzz about Mickey Rourke's performance, even if over-hyped, also made me want to see the movie. In the interest of balancing the emotional ledger, I also saw the current box office hit Mall Cop with comedian Paul Blart.
Mickey Rourke is excellent as an aging, washed up professional wrestler now on the B circuit, but I am quite surprised that no one seems to be talking about the movie itself, perhaps because it cuts too close to the bone. It is incredibly thought provoking.
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One of the important things this movie is about is the void at the heart of a culture in which celebrity has become the coin of the realm. It brilliantly captures the spiritual peril inherent in a society dominated by what Erich Fromm has called "the marketing principle," which in turn gives us "the marketing orientation" among the individuals who live and strive in such a society. This orientation leads not to community, but to the tribalism of celebrity culture with its narcissism and insistence on the commodification of self.
In this cultural milieu, the goals of life are shifting. For many people, it is more important to be famous than to be loved, or the former is equated with the latter in ways that make it more important to have a connection with an audience than a family or community. This abyss at the core of our obsession with celebrity is thrown into glaring relief as it is played out in The Wrestler at the lower echelons of the celebrity Pantheon - among wrestlers, strippers, et al.
At this end of the spectrum, the lower gods and goddesses lack the boundless financial resources available to the higher celebrity deities (e.g., Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey, et al.), and it is much more difficult to sustain the illusion of divinity.
Marisa Tomei's stripper is fixated on the occupational taboo against getting involved with customers, and this is a metaphor for the new spiritual regime. We are all products. We have to entertain our audience and sell ourselves. Genuine emotional engagement is bad for business.
This is more than fiction. Large swaths of daily life in the U.S. have become as artificial and contrived as a giant reality show, have become a kind of cultural aquarium that mimics reality and is transparent to everyone. New tools that on one hand can be used to enable and advance our communication with one another are, on the other hand, used to generate revenue through an endlessly shallow media spectacle that too often borders on the freakish.
Quiet time, solitude, remoteness, reflection, the time to mature and develop and grow internally away from the other cellular occupants of the aquarium is becoming almost impossible, indeed, almost unimaginable for large sectors of the population. Everything must happen in real time, we must always be broadcast, always be on the grid. In this milieu, solitude is the equivalent of death. It is critically important to have an alternative persona and a thousand "friends" on Facebook or MySpace.
Malls with their contrived and carefully controlled retail people-watching environment are the perfect metaphor for the aquarium phenomenon. Paul Blart's Mall Cop offers an interesting case study of mall/aquarium culture and an unintentional counterpoint to The Wrestler. Rather than exposing the risk of emotional disconnection at the nether reaches of aquarium culture, Mall Cop celebrates the disconnection as a good thing and a great relief. Why engage with the real world outside the mall, where the cops are corrupt and the struggle for survival is so unpleasantly difficult. Indeed, the faux scary intruders who commandeer the mall are there precisely to drive home the point. Life inside the mall, with its shallow emotional demands and controlled environment, is all light hearted fun once the troublesome and unpredictable outsiders have been banished by the gentle and amiably pudgy mall cop, who in the end has no desire to leave his Segway propelled position inside the mall.
The Wrestler offers artistic insight and a stark warning about the emotional disconnection of aquarium life. Mall Cop offers a clever and humorous - and likely unintentional - advertisement for the marketing orientation to life.
